We have been dealing with a lot of issues on our translation team recently. Amidst deaths and funerals and the daily difficulties, we recently had to let one of our translators go because of sexual immorality. Another confessed that he had nearly fallen into the same sin. We spent an entire week just thinking through the Christian response to sin, and how we can seek righteousness. In our discussions, we tread that fine line between demanding righteousness and recognizing weakness/offering grace. Because of a small view of sexual sin, our actions to remove a translator seemed to some to be severe and non-gracious. And yet, to not remove him would have communicated to the community that we are a people who tolerate sin.
There is, I have found, a tension within the church. We are called to confront sin, to not tolerate it in our churches, to even go so far as to remove the unrepentant from our midst. And yet, all the while we must confess our own sin and be wary that we do not fall into the same temptations of those whom we are confronting (Galatians 6:1). Is this not hypocrisy? How can we, who still sin, judge the sins of others? The world loves this tension, which you can see when they take great delight at the fall of a pastor. I present, though, that it is not hypocrisy for Christians to sin. However, our attitude towards sin tells us a lot about the state of our soul.
We Are All (Presently) Sinners
The next story that we are translating will be the story of David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11-12). It is astonishing that we still think of David as a “man after God’s own heart” and as a righteous king when committed both adultery and (hired-out) murder. I heard of one man’s response to reading the Bible for the first time as being something like: “All the people in the Bible are really messed-up except that Jesus guy.” The life of David is a messed-up story, but it is only one of many messed-up stories in the Bible. Because the Bible is full of sinners, it is full of sin. And lest we think we are any better, John tells us that, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
There is a reason that you can know that David was messed-up, but still love his psalms. He was a great man of God and was a great sinner. And that, in and of itself, is not hypocrisy. If you have come to accept the Gospel you start with the fact that all of us sin. Sin is not something of the past, it is something in the present. While we should certainly feel ashamed of our sins, we shouldn’t shy away from confessing them. A Christian confessing sin is a Christian proclaiming the Gospel, which is still needed for everyday of the Christian walk. A Christian who sins is not a contradiction, nor is it hypocrisy, if the sins are confessed and repented of.
We Are All Called Righteous, and Called to be Righteous
The flipside of this tension is that Christians, who still sin, are both called righteous, and called to be righteous. Paul knew that he was called “righteous” and that it had nothing to do with his own behavior. Here is what he says in Philippians 3:8-9,
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith…”
So, for Paul, Christians are righteous because of faith in the grace of God, not because of what they do. In this sense, we are “counted as righteous” like Abraham. When God looks at us, he sees his Son, and therefore sees us as righteous, even though we still sin. As Protestants, we really focus on this because there are so many false teachings which seek to persuade our people that they need to seek righteousness in our actions. No, we are not righteous in God’s eyes because of what we do, but instead because of what Christ has done.
However, if we stop there, it can either lead to people being comfortable in their sin (“Yes I sin, but I just ask for forgiveness and God forgives me.”) or denying their sin. I have seen the latter much more in the church. People trusting in the righteousness of God pretend they don’t sin because they fear that sin would contradict their testimony. This is hypocrisy and according to John is self-deception. No, Christians do still sin and we are called to actively pursue righteousness. Romans 6:13 is a clear call for Christians to pursue righteousness in their lives:
“Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.”
This is not the “righteousness that comes by faith,” but rather the practical righteousness that does take effort on our behalf. We are called to “be holy because [God] is holy” (1 Peter 1:16). We are called to “confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16). The Christian life is compared to a race (Hebrews 12:1) and a war (Galatians 5:17). Why? Because even though we are righteous before God, we are still in our sinful flesh and, as Jesus told his disciples, “the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). The process of growing in practical righteousness is often referred to as sanctification.
We Should be like Cats
When I was discussing this with my translators, I told them that the difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is not a lack of sin. Both Christians and unbelievers sin. However, their attitudes towards sin are remarkably different. I used the example of a pig. There are pigs all around in the village and when they are in the mud they root. They push their snouts deep in the mud, they roll around. They love it.
It is the same with unbelievers. When they sin, it feels good, natural. It feels so good that they start to associate their identity with it. Pretty much anytime in the West that you hear someone say, “I identify as…” it is followed by a sin. Men boast about being “players.” Athletes can’t get enough of telling people, “I am the greatest!” When caught doing something wrong, people will often say, “This is just who I am.” Perhaps when caught in a particularly embarrassing or costly sin, people will cry and express regret. However, they lack power to do anything about it and eventually will fall back into the same sins, again and again.
Christians, on the other hand, are called to something better. We are told that we are weak and that we are constantly in need of confession, repentance, and grace. However, for Christians it ought to look different. Sin should not feel natural to the Christian, it should feel dirty and wrong. If our identity is in Christ, we must view sin as a deviation from our identity, not a part of it. I wrestled to find something to compare this to, in following the pig illustration. One of my translators did it for me though. He said, “Christians should be like cats! They hate being dirty.” He was exactly right. Cats are constantly cleaning themselves, just like we as Christians should be.
Psalm 32, a psalm written by a great sinner, shows the difference very clearly. David had sinned, it was true. And while he was resisting confession and repentance he was like a dirty cat: unhappy and unsatisfied. He said, “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (vv 3-4). He could not be satisfied living in unconfessed sin. It was wrong, dirty, uncomfortable. But then he says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (v 5). This could lead him to conclude his psalm with, “Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!” (v 11).
Our hope in severing the contract with the one translator was never to condemn him. We did not judge him as though we were righteous and he a sinner. Rather, we were hoping to help him to be uncomfortable in his sin. We wanted him to feel like his bones were wasting away, not to hurt him, but to help him. We were not seeking to convince him that to be a Christian he needed to stop sinning, but rather to seek righteousness in his life like a runner seeking to win a race, or a warrior fighting in a battle.
I am happy to say that, as far as I can tell, this translator has sought repentance. He confessed his sin to his (common-law) wife, and then married her officially. He has been coming to our book study through Finally Free, which calls men to sexual purity. I believe that next month we will be able to welcome him back to our team, which is something he wants and we do to. My prayer is that this process will have made us all a bit more uncomfortable in sin, and more eager to confess quickly that we might know the joy of the forgiven David.
